Yenya's World

Wed, 28 May 2008

Browsers: Back to Square One

On Oct 15, 2005 i wrote
about Galeon development
slowing down, and I speculated that I would have needed to choose a new browser. With
recentproblems
of Galeon in Fedora 9, I have decided to look at the current state of
browsers again.

Firstly, Firefox: it is not a bad
browser, the Firefox 3.0beta in Fedora 9 even feels much faster than Galeon.
With some essential extensions it is almost usable: TreeStyleTab
allows to have tabs vertically on the right side, and NewTabURL
allows something other than a blank page to be
displayed in newly opened tabs (I wonder why these
two features are not included in the Firefox itself). FireGestures
are even better than in Galeon: more configurable (not that I need
that), but also the plugin displays the gesture. It also does not have
a long-standing Galeon bug, where gestures do not work over an empty tab.

Now the bad part: I need a "middle button pastes the URL in new
tab" functionality. It is much faster to have it on one click instead
of having to open new tab manually beforehand. Another problem is that
newly opened tabs do not inherit parent's history, so you cannot do Back
in them. There is no way how to create a "smart bookmarks" toolbar
(i.e. bookmarks with a wildcard in their URL, which are then displayed
as input boxes). In Galeon, it is very convenient to have things like
dictionaries, IS MU people search, Wikipedia, etc., each with separate
input box. Moreover, in Galeon you can open the search results in a
new tab by pressing Ctrl+Enter instead of Enter. The Firefox search
inputbox is really a bad joke: the text entered there remains there,
for example. So when you want to look up a new dictionary word,
instead of just pasting it there you have to clear the previous search
contents. Sometimes the NewTabURL stops working, so after opening a new
tab I wait whether my home page gets loaded or not. Unread tabs are not
displayed in a different color in the tab list. And finally, there is
this bug,
which makes saving and restoring session with multiple authenticated tabs
next to impossible. Reported almost two years ago, and still unfixed.

As for Epiphany, it is a bit
better: smart bookmarks are there, there is an extension for
moving tabs to the right side (left side actually, but it can be trivially
modified for the right side; I wonder why this is not in the main
distribution - having two line Python plugin instead of a configuration option
is really ugly). However, the gestures use a middle mouse button, and it
clashes with possible future "paste URL in the new tab" functionality.
Also the cookie manager is not as flexible as in Galeon and Firefox.

So after much experimenting and testing, actually using both Firefox and
Epiphany for several days, I have decided to downgrade Galeon
in my Fedora 9 to the one from Fedora 8, and I am back to square one.
Galeon is still the best browser available, despite being in pure maintainance
mode for two years. Both Firefox and Epiphany are getting better, but they
still lack some functionality, not to mention having real bugs.